A Hospital story about editing software.

Just because it's fun to have a forum where people are eager to think and discuss outside the narrow confines of the specific topic in the header.... (with a small hook into FCP-X et all at he end!)

I just spent a few days interacting with the hospital environment (my mom is 98 and doing very well, thanks, but it's inevitable that she'll be in and out of the medical world for the foreseeable future.)

It was interesting because the very modern hospital is in the midst of it's "medical records retrofit" initiative. This is likely driven, in part by the resent health care law changes and money flowing for the "modernization" of medical record keeping.

Some of it appeared pretty darn smart. At every point of patient contact, not just admissions, but in the ER at bedside, and in her private room, there was the cart containing a "connected" commuter workstation. Clearly the mandate was that all the relevant info HAD to be done in the system, so as to be available and accessible to everyone else. So the nurses knew what the doctors had noted, as did administration, and the lab, and everyone else. That part worked VERY well. And I could almost see the savings from the elimination of shuffling paper files, and the constant duplication of effort that a non-connected paper system must have yielded.

But the funny thing was that these were all boxes on carts trailing Ethernet Cables. Makes sense, but for a guy sitting at bedside interacting with the world on an iPad, it looked kinda quaint and even a little squirrely.

The point of relevance to this forum is that MEDICINE is also an industry undergoing massive changes in data flow and manipulation. Much like ours. And the traditional ways of addressing the needs are starting to look slow, measured and well, kinda creaky to be honest.

I sat there and looked at these CPUs on wheels with basic touch screens and keyboards on cantilevered trays and looked at my iPad and it struck me that maybe this is how it MUST be right now. While it's crystal clear that the new will eventually supplant the old. It's equally clear that without EVERYTHING in place, from security to confidentiality to accessibility to mobility - you can't just change the whole system in a hurry, no matter how stupid the "old way" looks.

The changing of the large operation is DEPENDENT on changes in the small stuff. All those "sanitizable" chrome carts, those wheel-mouned CPU Boxes and keyboards, and the dangling wires will eventually get pulled out and sent to the dumpster - and probably sooner than whoever is budgeting for them today would like.. But in the interim, they (and we) are stuck.

The best part of the experience was looking on the wall behind my Mother's bed. There, they had put up a massive white board. On it were the FIRST NAMES of all the medical personnel who were helping her. Her Doctor, The Nurse, the Charge Nurse, the CNA, the Dietitian, even the Orderly and the Janitorial staff assigned to her room. One simple, cheap, PERFECT place for the patient, the family and visitors to know who might come in the room, who is responsible for what, and who to ask for it there's any kind of issue.Talk about BRILLIANT!

There IS hope for us as a civilization if we can keep improving the tech, and keep our eyes on the real problems, knowing that sometimes tech isn't the best solution.

X is like the iPad. It's a great solution for some things. Not for everything. And it, or the similar products it is likely to spawn from other companies in the coming years, will solve real problems for real users, if not everything for everyone who needs to create content.

But in the end, you need the iPad, you need the expensive adjustable bed with integrated panic buttons and "patient out of the bed" alarm, and, most of all, you need smart people like whoever figured out the white board thing.

FWIW.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor

[Bill Davis] X is like the iPad. It's a great solution for some things. Not for everything. And it, or the similar products it is likely to spawn from other companies in the coming years, will solve real problems for real users, if not everything for everyone who needs to create content.

I agree.

But in the end, you need the iPad, you need the expensive adjustable bed with integrated panic buttons and "patient out of the bed" alarm, and, most of all, you need smart people like whoever figured out the white board thing.

Interesting if you read about Jobs stays in the hospital he supposedly would take out a sketch pad and start redesigning the tech the hospitals were using. Obviously he saw a need that he could fill. I know when people think about Jobs' passing and what it means for Apple's future, Steve had other interests. Pixar is one example.

I wouldn't have been surprised, had he lived longer, his hospital experience would have motivated him to go into medical technology and supplies. Not that Apple would do this (no more than Apple has anything directly to do with Disney/Pixar) but this would have evolved into his next tech business venture.